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NEW YORK SKETCHES 








On the Harlem River — University Heights from Fort George. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 



BY 



JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS 



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WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK:::::::::::::::::::::::::1902 



THF 1. IBBARV OF 
OON'^RESS, 

my. -59 1902 

OoPi'WOHT ENTRv 



Copyright, 1902, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published, November, 1902 



Trow Directory 

Printing if Bookbinding Company 

New York 



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TO 

i^eatic Crtigl)ton ^^tlliamjs 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Water-Front i 

The Walk Up-Town 27 

The Cross Streets , ... 63 

Rural New York City 99 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



On the Harlem River — University Heights from Fort George Frontispiece 

PACK 

Grant's Tomb and Ri\erside Drive (from the New Jersey Shore) . 3 

Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships 

go by 5 

Old New Amsterdam 7 

Just as it has been tor years. (Between South Ferry and the Bridge.) 

New New York, 9 

Not a stone's throw farther up . . . the towering white city of the new century. ( Between 
South Ferry and the Bridge. ) 

From the point of view of the Jersey commuter . . . some un- 
common, weird effects 1 1 

(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.) 

Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other • 13 

(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.) 

Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth Street . -15 

E,\'en in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or 

two 17 

The end of the day — looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge. 

For the little scenes . . . quaint and lovable, one goes down 

along the South Street water-front 19 

Smacks and oyster-Hoats near Fulton Market. ( At the foot of Beekman Street, East River. ) 

This is the tired city's playground 21 

Washington Bridge and the Speedway — Harlem River looking south. 

Here is where the town ends, and the country begins .... 23 

( High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge. ) 

The Old and the New, from Lower New York across the Bridge to 

Brooklyn 24 

From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine Street. 

ix 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The old town does not change so fast about its edges . . . -25 

I Along the upper East River front looking north to^vard Blackwell's Island.) 

opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green ... 29 

immigrant hotels and homes 30 

No. I Broadway 30 

Lower Broadway during a parade ° 30 

The beautiful spire of Trinity 31 

clattering, crowded, typical Broadway 32 

City Hall with its grateful lack of height 33 

What's the matter ? 34 

In the wake of a fire-engine 35 

No longer to be thrilled . . , will mean to be old . . -37 

Grace Church spire becomes nearer 39 

Through Union Square 40 

windows which draw women's heads around .... 41 

Instead of buyers . . . mostly shoppers 42 

crossing Fifth Avenue at Twent\-third Street .... 43 

Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear . . . October morning , 44 

In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel 45 

Diana on top glistening in the sun 46 

Seeing the A\'enue from a stage-top 47 

people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue 48 

A seller of pencils - 49 

It is also better walking up here 50 

those who walk for the sake of walking . . . . -5^ 

At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria 52 

with babv-carriages 53 

This is the region of Clubs 54 

(The Union League.) 

X 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



close-ranked boarding-school S(iuads 
the coachmen and footmen flock there 
The Church i)f the Heaxenly Rest .... 

Approaching St. Thomas's 

The University Club . . . with college coats-of-arm 

Olvmpia Jackies on shore leave 

Down near the eastern end of the street 

Across Trinity Church-yard, from the West 

An Evening View of St. Paul's Church 

The sights and smells of the water-front are here too 

An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side . 

(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets. ) 



Up Beekman Street 

Each ... has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to 



Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge 

Chinatown 

It still remains whimsically individual and village-like 

A Lourteenth Street Tree 

Such as broad Twentv-third Street with its famous shop 

A Cross Street at Madison Square .... 

Across Twentv-fourth Street — Madison Square when the 
was there 

Herald Square 

As it Looks on a W^et Night — The Circle, Fifty-nii 
Eishth A\enue 



block. 



Dewey 



Arcl 



th 



Street 



Hideous high buildings 

Looking east from Central Park at night. 

Flushing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire Alarm 
A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York . 

Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight. 

xi 



PAGE 

55 

56 

57 
59 
60 
61 
65 

67 
69 

71 

73 

75 

77 
79 
81 

«3 
«5 
«7 

88 
91 

93 
95 

103 
105 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

One of the Farmhouses that have Come to Town 107 

The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers. 

East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled .... 108 

The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old. Country 

Cross-roads Store 109 

The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828 . . . .110 

In the background is the old water-power mill. 

Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store ill 

The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographical Centre of 

New York City 112 

Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red 

handkerchiefs about their heads 119 

Remains of a Windmill in New York City, Between Astoria and 

Steinway 114 

The Dreary VAge of Long Island City 115 

The Procession of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry . .116 

Past dirty backyards and sad vacant lots 117 

New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx Regions — Skat- 
ing at Bronxdale 119 

Another Kind of City Life — Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay . 121 

There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of the city . 123 

Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island 126 

A Peaceful Scene in New York 127 

In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island. 

A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond . 128 

An Old-fashioned, Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island) . 129 

An Old House in Flatbush 131 



THE WATER-FRONT 





Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from tlie 
New Jersey Shore). 



THE WATER-FRONT 



DOWN along the Battery sea-wal] is the place to watch 
the ships go hy. 
Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far 
up the river under their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper 
shios that have to be towed from the lower bay, their too- 
masts down in order to scrape under the Brooklyn Bridge ; 
barques, brigs, brigantines — all sorts of sailing craft, with 
cargoes from all seas, and rtying the Hags of all nations. 

White-painted river steamers that seem all the more 
flimsy and riverish if they happen to churn out past the 
dark, compactly built ocean liners, who come so deliberately 
and arrogantly up past the Statue of Liberty, to dock after 

3 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the 
decks aheady waving handkerchiefs. Pkicky Httle tugs (that 
whistle on the shghtest provocation), pushing queer, bulky 
floats, which bear with ease whole trains of freight-cars, 
dirty cars looking frightened and out of place, which the 
choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And still queerer 
old sloop scows, with soiled, awkward canvas and no shape 
to speak of, bound for no one seems to know where and 
carrying you seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all 
day and night, whistling and pushing in and out between 
everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful, narrow-minded old terry- 
boats, with their wonderful helmsmen in the pilot-house, 
turning the wheel and looking unexcitable. 

That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the 
New York Dock Commission meets and the Police Patrol 
boat lies, and by Castle Garden, where the river craft pass so 
close you can almost reach out and touch them with your 
hand. 

The " water-front " means something different when you 
think of Riverside and its greenness, a few miles to the 
north, with Grant's tomb, white and glaring in the sun, and 
Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights. 

Here the '' lordly " Hudson is not yet obliged to become 
busy North River, and there is plenty of water between a 
white-sailed schooner yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in 
silence — for there is no excuse here for whistling — a cargo 
of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons ; while on 

4 




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', > ,ji Mill' II II )i III 7" ' I : 







Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and ferry- 
sUps there are yacht and rowing ckib houses and an occa- 
sional bathing pavilion ; and above the water edge, in place 
of the broken ridge of stone buildings with countless win- 
dows, there is the real bluff of good green earth with the 
well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on harness- 
chains and automobiles. 

Now, between these two contrasts you will find — you 
7nay find, I mean, for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe 
and the Orient before you begin to look at New York — as 
many different sorts of interests and kinds of picturesqueness 
as there are miles, as there are blocks almost. 

For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you 
go up toward the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and 
pull down your hat-brim far enough to hide the tower ot the 
Produce Exchange, you have a bit of old New Amsterdam, 
just as it has been for years, so old and so Amsterdamish, 
with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even 
wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that 
you are in Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is 
more like Hamburg, I am told, but either will do it you get 
an added enjoyment out of things by noting their similarity 
to something else and appreciate mountains and sunsets more 
by quoting some other person's sensations about other sun- 
sets and mountains. 

But if you believe that there is also an inherent, charac- 




Old New Amsterdam. 

Just as it has been tor years. 

(Between South 1-erry and the Bridge.) 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

teristic beauty in the material manifestations or the spirit of 
our own new, vigorous, fearless republic — and whether you do 
or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts 
referred to — not a stone's throw farther up the water-front 
there is a notable sight of newest New York. This, too, is 
good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with 
their square rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's 
commerce, if you wish), looms up a wondrous bit ot the 
towering white city of the new century, a cluster ot modern 
high buildings which, notwithstanding the perspective of a 
dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly high — 
symbols of modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching pos- 
sibilities, or they may remind you, in their massive grouping, 
of a cluster of mountains, with their bright peaks glistening 
in the sun far above the dark shadows ot the valleys in 
which the streams of business tiow, down to the wharves and 
so out over the world. 

Now, separately they may be impossible, these high 
buildings of ours — these vulgar, impertinent " sky-scrapers ;" 
but, as a group, and in perspective, they are fine, with a 
strong, manly beauty all their own. It is the same as with 
the young nation ; we have grown up so fast and so far that 
some of our traits, when considered alone, may seem dis- 
pleasing, but they appear less so when we are viewed as a 
whole and from the right point ot view. 

Or, on the other hand, for scenes not representatively 
commercial, nor residential either in the sense that Riverside 




New New York. 

Not a stone's throw farther up . . . the towcriiii,' while city of the new century. 

(Between South I'erry and tile Bridge.) 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

IS, but more of the sort that the word " picturesque " sug- 
gests to most people : There are all those odd nooks and 
corners, here and there up one river and down the other, 
popping out upon you with unexpected vistas full of life and 
color. Somehow the old town does not change so fast 
about its edges as back from the water. It seems to take a 
longer time to slough off the old landmarks. 

The comfortable country houses along the shore, half- 
way up the island, first become uncomfortable city houses ; 
tlien tenements, warehouses, sometimes hospitals, even police 
stations, before they are finally hustled out of existence to 
make room for a foul-smelling gas-house or another big 
brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling 
down ; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupo- 
las and dusty fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional 
bit of old-fashioned garden, with a bunker which was for- 
merly a terrace, and the dirty remains of a summer-house 
where children once had a good time — and still do have, 
difierent-looking children, who love the nearby water just 
as much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not 
only by way of the recreation piers that these children and 
their parents enjoy the water. It is a deep-rooted instinct 
in human nature to walk out to the end of a dock and sit 
down and gaze; and hundreds of them do so every day in 
summer, up along here. Now and then through these 
vistas you get a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island 
with its prison and hospital and poorhouse buildings. Those 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

who see it oftenest do not consider it beautiful. They 
always speak of it as "The Island." 

For those who do not care to prowl about for the scat- 
tered bits of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would 
call *' a magniticent panorama," there are plenty of good 
points of vantage from which to see whole sections at once, 
such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of high buildings, 
or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious 
that many Manhattanese would never make use of this 
opportunity were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor 
on their hands. No one ouijht to be allowed to live in 
New York City — he ought to be made to live in Brooklyn 
— who does not go out there and look back at his town 
o]ice a vear. He could look at it every day and get new 
effects ot light and color. Even in sky-line he could tind 
something new almost every week or two. In a few years 
there will be a more or less even line — at least a gentle un- 
dulation — instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a 
disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great 
conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings. 

The sky-line and its constant change can be watched to 
best advantage from the point of view o£ the Jersey com- 
muter on the ferry ; he also has some wonderful coloring to 
look at and some uncommon, weird effects, such as that of 
a late autumn afternoon (when he has missed the ^.i ^ and 
has to go out on the 6.26) and it is already quite dark, but 
the city is still at work and the towering office-buildings are 



THE WATER-FRONT 




Swooping silently, confidently ;icross from one rity to the other. . . . 
(l-ast River aiul HriKiklvii l;ri.|.^'c.) 

lighted — are brilliant indeed with many perfectly even rows 
of light dots. The dark plays tricks with the distance, and 
the water is black and snaky and smells of the night. All 

I'. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

sorts of strange liares ot light and pufts ot shadow come 
from somewhere, and altogether the commuter, it he were 
not so accustomed to the scene, ought not to mind being 
late for dinner. However, the commuter is used to this, 
too. 

That scene is spectacular. There is another from the 
water that is dramatic. Possibly the pilots on the Fall River 
steamers become hardened, but to most of us there is an 
exciting delight in creeping up under that great bridge 
of ours and daringly slipping through without having it 
fall down this time ; and then looking rather boastfully 
back at it, swooping silently, confidently across from one 
city to the other, as graceful and lean and characteristically 
American in its line as our cup defenders, and as overwhelm- 
ingly powerful and fearless as Niagara Falls. However 
much like the Thames Embankment is the bit of East Fifty- 
ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful you may 
be in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the 
Seine, our big bridges cannot very well remind anyone of 
anything abroad, because there aren't any others. 

For the little scenes that are not inspiring or awful, but 
simply quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South 
Street water-front. Fulton Market with its memorable 
smells and the marketeers and 'longshoremen ; and behind it 
the slip where clean-cut American-model smacks put in, and 
sway excitedly to the wash from the Brooklyn ferry-boats, 
which is not noticed by the sturdy New Haven Line steam- 

14 




^UV<<}ii\(>- 



rji M iiiii mir ii i iii i tiiiM '"--—— "" -——— — j-m—- ^ 

Looking ui) the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth Street. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

ers nearby. On the edge of the street and the water are the 
oyster floats, half house and half boat, which look like solid 
shops, with front doors, from the street side until, the seas 
hitting them, they, too, begin to sway awkwardly and startle 
the unaccustomed passer-by. 

It is down around here that you find slouching idly in 
front of ship-stores, loafing on cables and anchors, the jolly 
jack tar of modern days. From all parts ot the world he 
comes, any number of him, if you can tell him when you see 
him, for he is seldom tarry and less often Jolly, unless drunk 
on the very poor grog he gets in the various evil-looking 
dives thickly strewn along the water-fronts. Some ot these 
are modern plate-glass saloons, but here and there is a cosey 
old-time tavern (with a step-down at the entrance instead of 
a step-up), low ceiling, dark interior, and in the window a 
thicklv painted ship's model with flies on the rigging. 

Farther down, near Wall Street ferry, where the smells 
of the world are gathered, you may see the stevedores un- 
loading liqueurs and spices from tropical ports, and coffees 
and teas ; nearby are the places where certain men make 
their livings tasting these teas all day long, while the horse- 
cars jangle by. 

Old Slip and other odd-named streets are along here, 
where once the water came before the city outgrew its 
clothes ; before Water Street, now two or three blocks back, 
had lost all right to its name. Here the big slanting bow- 
sprits hunch away in over South Street as if trying to be 

i6 




U2 c 
-3 -^ 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

quits with the hind for its encroachment, and the plain old 
brick buildings huddled together across the way have no 
cornices for fear of their being poked off. Queer old build- 
ings they are, sail lofts with their peculiar roofs, and sailors' 
lodging-houses, and the shops where the seaman can buy 
everything he needs from suspenders to anchor cables, so 
that after a ten-thousand mile cruise he can spend all his 
several months' pay within two blocks of where he lirst puts 
foot on shore and within one night from when he does so. 
Very often he has not energy to go farther or money to buy 
anything, thanks to the slavery system which conducts the 
sailors' lodging-houses across the way. There is nothing 
very picturesque about our modern merchant marine and its 
ill-used and over-worked sailors ; it is only pathetic. 

Those are some of the reasons, I think, why East 
River is more interesting to most of us than North River. 
Another reason, perhaps, is that East River is not a 
river at all, but an arm of the ocean which makes Long 
Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it holds 
the charm of the sea. The North River side of the town 
in the old days had less to do with the business of those who 
go down to the sea in ships, was more rural and residential; 
and now its w^ater-tront is so jammed with railway ferry- 
houses and ocean-steamship docks that there is little room 
tor anything else. 

However, these long, roofed docks of famous Cunarders 
and American and White Star Liners, and of the French 

i8 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

steamers (which have a round-roof dock of a sort all their 
own) are interesting in their way, too, and the names ot the 
foreign ports at the open entrance cause a strange tret to be 
up and going ; especially on certain days ot the week when 
thick smoke begins to pour from the great tunnels which 
stick out so enormously above the top story of the now^ noisy 
piers. Cabs and carriages with coachmen almost hidden by 
trunks and steamer-rugs crowd in through the dock-gates, 
while, within, the hold baggage-derricks are rattling and 
there is an excited chatter of good-by talk. 

By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its 
broad expanse of cobble-stones, the steamship lines begin to 
thin out and the ferries are now sprinkled more sparsely. 
Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal- 
yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and tactories 
are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all 
of which are the best. . . Farther up is the region 

of slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their 
smells. . . . And so on up to Riverside, and across 
the new bridge to the unknown wildness of Manhattan's 
farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks, 
which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked 
upon more often than tormerly. 

But over on the east edge of the town there is more to 
look at and more of a variety. All the way from the Bridge 
and the big white battle-ships squatting in the Navy Yard 
across the river ; up past Kip's Bay with its dapper steam- 



i 1*4-- 



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This is the tired (ity s play^r'iinid. 
Washington Bridge and the Speedway— Harlem River looking south. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

yachts waiting to take their owners home from business ; 
past BellevLie Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth 
Street ferry with its streams of funerals and tishing-parties; 
Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doc- 
tors playing tennis, oblivious to their surroundings ; Hell 
Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are drowned 
every year ; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is 
too bad there are not more of these parks on our water- 
fronts) ; past Ward's Island with its public institutions ; Ran- 
dall's Island with more public institutions — and so, up into 
the Harlem, where soon, around the bend, the occasional tall 
mast looks very incongruous when seen across a stretch of 
real estate. 

And now you have a totally different feel in the air and 
a totally different sort of "scenery." It is as different as the 
use it is put to. Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the 
Battery, it was nearly all work ; up here it is nearly all play. 

On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs, 
bathing pavilions — they bump into each other, they are so 
thick ; on the water itself their members and their contents 
bump into each other on holidays — launches, barges, racing- 
shells and all sorts of small pleasure cratt. 

Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are 
the two fields famous for football victories, baseball cham- 
pionships, track games, open-air horse shows ; across the 
bridge go the bicyclers and automobilists, hordes of them, 
brazen-braided bicyclists who use chewing-gum and lean far 



w ,/**! 






Here is where the town ends, and the country begins. 
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.) 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 









Mf' 






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. .^^ ll_H_uiLiii 



I he Old and (he New, from Lower New 
\ ork Across the Bridge to Brooklyn. 

1 II. m tliL tiij) if the high building at Broadway 
and Pine Street. 



}i 



*^V^ 



o V e r , leather coated 
chauffeurs with their 
eyes unnecessarily pro- 
/ ^ tected. 

Up the river are college and school ovals and athletic 
fields; on the ridges upon either side are walks and paths 
for lovers. For the lonely pedestrian and antiquarians, two 
old revolutionary forts and some good colonial architecture. 
Whirly-go-rounds and big wheels for children, groves and 
beer-gardens for picnickers ; while down on one bank of 
the stream upon the broad Speedway go the thoroughbred 
trotters with their red-faced masters behind in light -colored 
driving coats, eyes goggled, arms extended. 

On the opposite banks are the two railroads taking peo- 
ple to Ardsley Casino, St. Andrew's Golf Club, and the 
other country clubs and the public links at Van Cortlandt 

24 



THE WATER-FRONT 

Park, and taking picnickers and family parties to Mosholu 
Park, dud regiments and squadrons to drill and play battle 
in the inspection ground nearby, and botanists and natural- 
ists and sportsmen for tlieir fun tlirther up in the good green 

country. 

No wonder there is a different feeling in the air up 




The old town does not change so fast about its edges. 
(Alonu the upper Hast Kiver front looking north toward Blackwell's Island.) 

25 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

along the best known end of the city's water-front. The 
small, unimportant looking winding river, long distance 
views, wooded hills, green terraces, and even the great solid 
masonry of High Bridge, and the asphalt and stone resting- 
places on Washington Bridge somehow help to make you 
feel the spirit of freedom and outdoors and relaxation. This 
is the tired city's playground. Here is where the town 
ends, and the country begins. 




THE WALK UP-TOWN 




opposite llio oval of the ancient Bovvlin.i^ (Ireeu. 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 



THE walk Lip-town reaches from the bottom of the 
buzzing region where money is made to the bright 
zone where it is spent and displayed ; and the walk is a de- 
light all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm, exhil- 
aration — almost intoxication, on its best days. 

Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of 
all walks of this sort in the world New York's is the best. 
The walk in London from the city to the West End by 
way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly, is teeming with 

29 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




immigrant hotels and homes, 




No. I Broadway. 



■^-^^.^-f 




Lower Croaduay durinj^ a parade. 



interest to the tourist — Temple 
Bar, St. Clement's, Trafalgar 
Square and all — hut, for a walk 
up-town, a walk home to he taken 
daily, it is apt to he oppressive 
and saddening, even without the 
tog ; so say many of those who 
know it best. Paris, with her 
houlevards, undoubtedly has unap- 
proachable opportunities for the 
Y^^JX jianeu}\ but like Rome and Vienna 
^^|i and most of the other European 
capitals, she has no one main ar- 
'' tery for a homeward stream of 
working humanity at close of day ; 
and that is what " the walk up- 
town " means. 

And yet so few, comparative- 
ly, of those whose physique and 
office hours permit, take this ap- 
petizing, worry-dispelling walk of 
ours ; this is made obvious every 
afternoon, from three o'clock on, 
by the surface and elevated cars, 
into which the bulk of scowling 
New York seems to prefer to push 
itself, after a day spent mostly in- 
3° 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 



doors ; here to get humped and ill-tempered, snatching an 
occasional glimpse of the afternoon paper held in the hand 
which does not clutch the strap overhead. It seems a great 
pitv. The walk is just the 
ri'iht lenijth to take hetore 
dressing tor dinner. A line 
drawn eastward trom the 
park plaza at Fifty-eighth 
Street will almost strike an 
old mile-stone still standing 
in Third Avenue, which 
says, " 4 miles trom City 
Hall, New York." The 
City Hall was in Wall 
Street when those old-fash- 
ioned letters were cut, and 
Third Avenue was the Post 
Road. 

I 

Many good New York- 

, 1 • .1 1 i~ The beautiful spire of Trinity . . . 

ers (chieiiv, however, or 

that small per cent, horn in New York, who generally know 
rather little about their town except that they love it) have 
not been so remotelv tar down the island as Battery Park for 
a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices 
which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses 




NEW YORK SKETCHES 



of the good old Row (though once called " Mushroom 
Row ") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, 
where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits 

and stares all day. (Now 
that these old gable win- 
dows and broad chimneys 
are gone I wonder how he 
will like the new Custom- 
house. ) 

Now, the grandmothers 
of these same New York- 
ers, long ago, before there 
were any steamships, when 
Castle Garden was a sepa- 
rate island and Battery Park 
was a fashionable esplanade 

. . . clattering, crowded, typical Ilr-adway. ^^Om which tO Watch the 

shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills — 
their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying ret- 
icules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut 
shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the 
early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those 
days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can 
see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths 
from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashion- 
able. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the 
gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more 

32 




THE WALK UP-TO\VN 




varieties oi' wuter-cratt to 
gaze at in the bristling hay. 
I should think more people 
would come to look at it all. 
I mean ot those even 
who do not like to mingle 
with other species than their 
own and yet want tresh air 
and exercise. On a Sundav 

.,-1 ... City 1 1, ill with its trrateful lack of heiijht . . . 

in winter it thev were to 

come down here tor their atternoon stroll they would iind 
(after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less 
*' objectionable " people and tewer ot them than on the 
crowded up-town walks. 

What there are of strollers down here — in winter — are 
representatives ot the various sets ot eminently respectable 
janitors' families {of which there are almost as manv grades 
as there are heights ot the roots trom which they have de- 
scended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers, 
and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are 
to be seen on those tiimsv, one-horsed express wagons com- 
ing from the Barge Otiice, seated on piles of dirty baggage 
— with steerage ta2:s still fresh — whole tamilies oi them, 
bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound tor 
the toreio;n-named emiijrant hotels and homes which are as 
interesting as the immigrants. Some ot these latter are right 
opposite there on State Street, including one with " pillared 

33 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




What's the matter? 



balcony rising from the 
second floor to the roof," 
which is said to be the ear- 
her home of Jacob Dolph 
in Banner's novel — a better 
fate surely than that of the 
other New York house tor 
which the book was named. 
Across the park and up 
and around West Street are 
more of these immigrant 
places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's 
law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the 
smallest and lowest-ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or 
tried to, in his amateur emigranting. 

These are among the few older houses in New York 
used for the same purposes as from the beginning. They 
seem to have been left stranded down around this earliest 
part of the town by an eddy in the commercial current 
which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from 
its original moorings. . . . But this is not what is com- 
monly meant by '* down-town," though it is the farthest 
down you can go, nor is it where the walk up-town prop- 
erly begins. 

The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway 
begins, somewhat above the bend, past the foreign consulates, 
away from the old houses and the early nineteenth century 

34 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




In the wake nf a fne-L-n^lne. 



atmosphere. Crowded side- 
walks, a continuous roar, 
intent passers-by, jammed 
streets, clanging cable-cars 
with down-towners dodg- 
ing them automatically ; 
the region of the modern 
high business building. 

Above are stories un- 
countable (unless you are 
willing to be b u m p e d 
into) ; beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight 
ahead or dashing in and out of these large doors which 
are kept swinging back and forth all day ; very heavy doors 
to push, especially in winter, when there are sometimes 
three sets of them. Within is the vestibule bulletin-board 
with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it ; 
near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who 
knows them all, and starts the various elevators by ex- 
claiming " Up ! " in a resonant voice. While outside the 
crowd still hums and hurries on ; it never gets tired ; it 
seems to pav no attention to anything. It is a matter ot 
wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the 
corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe- 
strino-s and rubber faces who are thick between the corners, 
to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter ot trucks or 
the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing 

35 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers 
on the huge girders of that new office building across the way. 

But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to 
ail these common phenomena of the city street. As a 
matter o{ fact, half of them are not so terrifically busy and 
important as they consider themselves. They seem to be in 
a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as all know 
who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most 
of them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance 
simply from imitation or a habit generated bv the spirit of 
the place. But it gives a quaking sensation to the poor 
young man from the country who has been walking the 
streets for weeks looking for a job ; and it makes the visit- 
ing foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped 
phrase or two about Americans — next to his note about our 
*' Quick Lunch " signs which never fail to astonish him, 
and behind which may be seen lunchers lingering for the 
space of two cigars. 

An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes 
scudding down the street. A very important young interne 
is on the rear keeping his balance with arrogant ease. His 
youthful, spectacled face is set in stony indifference to all 
possible human suffering. The police clear the way for 
him. And now see your rushing " busy throng " forget 
itself and stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five 
seconds, and still stays there, growing larger, after those 
walking up-town have passed on. 



THE WALK UP-'1C)VVN 



The heiiutiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, hrown stone 
and the o;reen trees and qiKiintlv lettered historic tonihs 
heneath and the damp niomnnent to Kevohitionary martyrs 
over in one corner — no k)nger U)oks down henignly on all 
ahout it, hecause, tor the 
most part, it has to look 
up. On all sides men have 
reared their marts ot com- 
merce higher t h a n the 
house ot God. 

It seems perfectly prop- 
er that they should, for they 
must huild in some direc- 
tion and see \vhat valuable 
real estate thev have given 
up to those dead people 
who cannot even appreciate 
it. Here among the quiet 
graves the thoughtful stran- 

. . No longer to be thrilled . . . will inean to be old. 

gGV IS accustomed to moral- 
ize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is " the 
hurrying throng " just outside the iron fence, who, by the 
way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three 
or four times, and so can't very \vd\ keep on being impressed 
by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just 
as well not to worrv during the hours God meant tor work. 
Even though one cannot get much of a view trom the stee- 

37 




NEW YORK SKETCHES 

pie, except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and dis- 
appointingly narrow and quiet at first sight. Trinity is still 
one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing 
and resttul landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves 
to be starred in Baedeker. 

Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town : 
from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical 
Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street 
it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers 
from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so 
capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128. 

The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this 
section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would 
probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, al- 
though half of them never spend an entire day in New York 
City from one end of the month to the other, and half of 
that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of 
the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than 
that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker 
should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of 
the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters 
pour. 

Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, 
so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story build- 
ings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door, 
seem like playthings beside which the modern building 

38 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 



shoots up — on up, as if just beginning where the old ones 
left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, 
or magnified obelisks, as seen from the terries, the windows 
and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like 
plain goods-boxes on end, 
or suirirest, the ornate ones, 
pieces of carefully cut cake 
standino; alone and ready to 
fall oyer at any moment 
and damage the icing. 

Good old St. Paul's, 
which is really old and, to 
some of us, more lovable 
than ornate, Anglican Trin- 
ity, has also been made to 
look insignificant in size by 
its overpowering commer- 
cial neighbors, especially as 
seen from the Sixth Avenue 
Elevated cars against the 
new, ridiculous high build- 
ino; on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Co- 
lonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care 
so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so 
large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more 
rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as 
though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business. 

39 




Grace Church spire becomes nearer. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




Through Union Square. 



Now, off to the right 
oblique from St. Paul's, 
marches Park Row with its 
very mixed crowd, which 
overflows the sidewalks, not 
only now at going-home 
time, but at all hours of 
the day and most of the 
night ; and on up, under 
the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying 
Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon 
come to the Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and 
that, of course, is -A walk worth taking. But The Walk 
Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the 
substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining 
down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as 
hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on be- 
cause we know — or, if strangers, because we do not know — 
that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, 
unstrenuous beautv of the City Hall with its grateful lack 
of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the first 
trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there, 
under those other trees — up near the court-house, I suppose 
— is where certain memorable boy stories used to begin, 
with a poor, pathetic newsboy who did noble deeds and in 
the last chapter always married the daughter of his former 

employer, now his partner. 

40 



THE WALK UP-TC)VVN 



By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have 
settled down to a steady pace; others are just tailing in at 
this point — just falling in here where once (not so very 
many years ago) the city fathers thought that few would 
pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap 
red sandstone in the back 
of the City Hall. 

Over there, on the west 
side of the street, still stands 
a complete row ot early 
buildings — one of the very 
few remaining along Broad- 
way — with gable windows 
and wide chimneys. Law- 
yers' offices and insurance 
signs are very prominent 
for a time. Then comes a 
block or two chiefly ot 
sporting-goods stores with 
windows crowded full ot 
hammerless guns, smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and 
other delights which from morning to night draw sighs out ot 
little boys w^ho press their taces against the glass awhile and 
then run on. Next is a thin stratum composed chietiy ot 
ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you find yourself in the heart 
of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one 
over another, w^ith names ''like a list of Rhine wines;" 
block after block of it, a long, unbroken stretch. 

41 




windows which draw women's heads around. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




Instead of buyers 



mostly shoppers. 



II 

This comes nearer to being monotonous than any part 
of the walk. But even here, to lure the walker on, tar 
ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the canon of commer- 
cial Broadway, can be seen the pure w^hite spire of Grace 
Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if 
purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those 
below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are 
some Christians. 

But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are 
they all black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking 
dollars; at six o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs 
and elevators, and out upon the street with a look ot re- 
lief; stenographers, cloak inspectors, forewomen, and little 
girls of all ages. Then you hear '' Good-night, Mame." 
*' Good-night, Rachel." "What's your hurry? Got a 
date?" And off they go, mostly to the eastward, looking 

exceedingly happy and not invariably overworked. 

42 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




crossing Fiftli Avenue at 'I'wenty-third Street. 



Others are emissaries from the sw^eat-shops, men with 
long heards and large hundles and very soher eyes, patri- 
archal-looking sometimes when the heard is white, who go 
upstairs with their loads and come down again and trudge 
ofF dowMi the side-street once more to go on w^here they left 



off, hv gas-light now. 



And all this was once the great Broadway where not 
many years ago the promenaders strutted up and down in 
the afternoon, women in low neck and India shawls ; dan- 
dies, as they were then called, in tremendous trousers with 
huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a tew stroll- 
ers here hy mistake, elderly people from a distance revisit- 
ing New York after many years and hringing their families 
with them. *' Now, children, you are on Broadway!" the 
fatherly smile seems to say. " Look at everything." They 
probably stop at the Astor House. 

As the wholesale dry-goods district is left behind and 
the realm of the jobbers in *' notions " is reached, and the 

43 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear 
October morning. 



handlers of artificial flowers 
and patent buttons and all 
sorts of specialties, Grace 
Church spire becomes near- 
er and clearer, so that the 
base of it can be seen. 
Here, as below, and farther 
below and above and every- 
where along Broadway, are 
the stoop and sidewalk sell- 
ers of candies, dogs, combs, 
chewing-gum, pipes, looking - glasses, and horrible burn- 
in p- smells. They seem especially to love the neighbor- 
hood of what all walkers up-town detest, a new building in 
the course of erection — with sidewalks blocked, and a set of 
steep steps to mount — only, your true walker up-town always 
prefers to go around by way of the street, where he is almost 
run down by a cab, perhaps, which he forgets entirely a 
moment later when he suddenly hears a stirring bell, an ap- 
proaching roar, and a shrieking whistle growing louder : 

Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at 
a gallop, the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning for- 
ward with arms out straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke 
behind. Another whizz, and the long ladder-wagon shoots 
across with firemen slinging on their flapping coats, while 
behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who 
could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell 

44 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




at the engine-house could 
keep from ringing when 
the policeman turned on 
the circuit. A n d young 
boys are not the only ones. 
No more to be thrilled by 
this delight — it will mean 
to be old. 

Ill 

At last Grace Church, 
with its clean light stone, is ^" f'°"' '' ''"" ^'^^'^ ^^"""^ "°'^'- 

reached ; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the 
interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And 
now— in tact, a little before this point — about where stood 
that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign *' Old 
London Street " — which was used now for church ser- 
vices and now prize-hghts and had never been much of a 
success at anything — about here, the up-town walkers no- 
tice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-tops of 
Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of houses in 
all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed 
even more than the direction of the street changes. A 
short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale, 
now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the 
people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there 
were very few women ; up here are very few men. This 

45 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




Diana on top glistening in tiie sun. 



is especially noticeable 
when Union Square is 
reached, with cable - cars 
clanging around Dead 
Man's Curve in front of 
Lafayette's statue. Here, 
down Fourteenth Street, 
may be seen shops and 
shoppers of the most viru- 
lent type; windows which 
draw women's heads around 
whether they want to look 
or not, causing them to run 
you down and making them deaf to your apologies for it. 
Big dry-goods stores and small millinery shops ; general 
stores and department stores, and the places where the side- 
walks are crowded with what is known to the trade as 
" Louis Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for 
there being more restaurants now and different smells and 
another feeling in the air. 

From the upper corner of Union Square, with its flit- 
tering jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' build- 
ings, and its somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fash- 
ionable but now fast becoming out-of-date and landmarky 
(though they seem good enough to those who sit and wait 
on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison 
Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up- 

46 



THE WAT.K UP-TOWN 



Bill- - -^ 



'A 



. .laagJIjiSg 



Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top. 



town traveller. This will 
help him up the interven- 
ing hlocks if he is not in- 
terested in the stretch ot 
stores, though these are a 
different sort of shop, and 
they seem to say, with their 
large, impressive windows, 
their footmen, their huttons 
at the door, "We are very su- 
perior and fashionable." 

The shoppers, too, are 
not so rapacious along here, 
because they have more time ; and the clatter is not so 
great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the 
street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, tor 
along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different 
sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all : nuns, 
actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls 
going to Huvler's, artists on the way to the Players' — the 
best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in 
town may be seen here of a bright afternoon. 

When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides 
and, as some would have us think, all the " nice " people go 
to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, 
up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tender- 
loin. 

47 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue. 



But when Madison 
Square is reached you have 
come to one of the Places 
of New York. It is the 
picture so many confirmed 
New Yorkers see when 
homesick, Madison Square 
with the sparkle ot a clear, 
bracing October morning, 
the creamy Garden Tower 
over the trees, standing out 
clear-cut against the sky, 
Diana on top glistening in 
the sun ; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park, 
a long, decorative row ot cabs waiting tor " tares," over to- 
ward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women, 
wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, cross- 
ing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tam- 
many policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his 
little linger. 

It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side 
by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim, 
" Oh, Paris ! " because, I suppose, there is a broad open ex- 
panse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it 
seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. 
It has an atmosphere distinctively its own — so distinctly its 

own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page, 

48 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




A seller of pencils. 



miss it entirely, simply be- 
cause they are looking for 
and failing to tind the at- 
mosphere of some other 
place. 

IV 

Now this last lap of the 
walk — from green Madison 
Square and the new Mar- 
tin's up the sparkling ave- 
nue to the broad, bright 
Plaza at the Park entrance, 
where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving, 
with their awnings flapping and flags out straight — makes 
the most popular part of all the walk. 

This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, 
far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry ; this 
is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose — and that, 
with the accompanying glitter and glamour, is always more 
interesting to the great bulk of humanity. 

It is also better walking up here. The pavements are 
cleaner now and there is more room upon them. A man 
could stand still in the middle of the broad, smooth walk 
and look up in the air without collecting a crowd instanta- 
neously. You can talk to your companion and hear the 
reply since the welcome relief of asphalt. 

49 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




It is also better walking up lierc. 



Here can be seen hun- 
dreds of those who walk for 
the sake of walking, not 
only at this hour but all day 
long. In the morning, 
large, prosperous - looking 
New Yorkers with side- 
whiskers and well-ted bod- 
ies — and, unintentionally, 
such amusing expressions, 
sometimes — walking part 
way, at least, down to business, with partly read newspapers 
under their arms; while in the opposite direction go young 
girls, slender, erect, with hair in a braid and school-books 
under their arms and well-prepared lessons. 

Then come those that walk at the convenience of dogs, 
attractive or kickable, and a little later the close-ranked 
boarding-school squads and the cohorts of nurse-maids with 
baby-carriages four abreast, charging everyone off the side- 
walk. Next come the mothers of the babies and their 
aunts, setting out for shopping, unless they have gone to 
ride in the Park, and for Guild Meetings and Reading Clubs 
and Political Economy Classes and Heaven knows what 
other important morning engagements, ending, perhaps, 
with a visit to the nerve-specialist. 

And so on throughout the morning and afternoon and 
evening hours, each with its characteristic phase, until the 

5° 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




those who walk for the sake of walking. 



last late theatre-party has 
gone home, laughing and 
talking, from s u p p e r at 
Sherry's or the Waldorf- 
Astoria; the last late hach- 
elor has left the now quiet 
cluh ; the rapping ot his 
cane along the silent avenue 
dies away down an echoing 
side-street ; and a lonely 
policeman n o d s in the 
shadow of the church gate-post. Suddenly the earliest milk- 
wagon comes jangling up from the ferry ; then dawn comes 
up over the gas-houses along East River and it all hegins 
over again. 

But the most popular and populous time of all is the 
regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have 
spent the dav down toward the end of the island at work, 
but for those who have no more serious business to look 
after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, 
or from house to house drinking tea. 

All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same 
ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we 
somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know 
quite well, and we wonder who they are — and they wonder 
who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen, 
walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented 

51 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 








At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria. 



young couples who look at 
the old furniture in the 
antique-shop windows and 
who are evidently married, 
and other younger couples 
who evidently soon will be, 
and see nothing, not even 
their friends. Intent- 
browed young business men 
with newspapers under 
their arms ; governesses out 
with their charges ; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock 
eyes, especially on matinee day with programmes in their 
hands, talking gushingly. 

It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd; 
and each member grows to expect certain other members at 
particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed 
when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is 
not with his daughter this evening. ** What can be the 
matter?" the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone. 

There is one man, the disagreeable member of the 
club, a bull-frog-looking man of middle age with a Ger- 
manic face and beard, a long stride, and a tightly buttoned 
walking-coat (I'm sure he's proud of his chest), who comes 
down when we are on the way up and gets very indignant 
every time we happen to be late. His scowl says, as plainly 
as this type, *' What are you doing way down here by the 

52 



THE WALK UP-TOVVN 




with baby-carriaKes. 



Reform Club ? You know 
you ought to he passing the 
Cathedral by this time ! " 
And the worst of it is, we 
always do feel ashamed, 
and I'm afraid he sees it. 

This mile and a half 
from where Flora McFlim- 
sey lived to the beginning 
of the driving in the Park 
is not the staid, sombre, provincial old Fifth Avenue which 
Flora McFlimsey knew. Up Fifth Avenue to the Park 
New York is a world-city. 

Not merely have so many of the brown-stone dwellings, 
with their high stoops and unattractive impressiveness, been 
turned over to business or pulled down altogether to make 
room for huge, hyphenated hotels, but the old spirit of the 
place itself has been turned out ; the atmosphere is different. 

The imported smartness of the shops, breeches makers 
to His Royal Highness So-and-So, and millinery establish- 
ments with the same Madame Luciles and Mademoiselle 
Lusettes and high prices, that have previously risen to tame 
in Paris and London, together with the numerous clubs and 
picture-galleries, all furnish local color; but it is the people 
themselves that you see along the streets, the various lan- 
guages they speak, their expression o£ countenance, the way 

53 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




they hold themselves, the 
manner of their servants — 
in a word, it is the atmos- 
phere of the spot that 
makes you feel that it is 
not a mere metropolis, but 
along this one strip at least 
our New York is a cos- 
mopolis. 

And the Walk-Up-town 

This is the region of clubs. (The Union League.) i • i i • i 

hour IS the best time to ob- 
serve it, when all the world is driving or walking home from 
various duties and pleasures. 

There, on that four-in-hand down from Westchester 
County comes a group of those New Yorkers who, unwill- 
ingly or otherwise, get their names so often in the papers. 
The lackey stands up and blows the horn and they manage 
very well to endure the staring of those on the sidewalks. 

Here, in the victoria behind them, is a woman who 
worships them. She would give many of her husband's 
new dollars to be up there too, though pretending not to see 
the dracr. See how she leans back in the cushions and tries 
to prop her eyebrows up, after the manner of the Duchess 
she once saw in the Row. She succeeds fairly well, too, if 
only her husband wouldn't spoil it by crossing his legs and 
exposing his socks. 

Here are other women with sweet, artless faces who do 

54 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




close-ranked bnarriing-school squads. 



not seem to be strenuous or 
spoiled (iis yet) by the world 
thev move in, and these are 
the most beautiful women 
in all the world ; some in 
broughams (as one popular 
storv-writer invariably puts 
his heroines), or else walk- 
ing independently with an 
interesting gait. 

Here, in that landau, 
comes the latest foreign-titled visitor, urbane and thought- 
fully attentive to all that his friends are saying and pointing 
out to him. And here is a bit ot color, some world-exam- 
ining, tired-eyed Maharajah, with silk clothes — or was it only 
one of the foreign consuls who drive along here every day. 

There goes a fashionable city doctor, who has a high 
gig, and correspondingly high prices, hurrying home tor his 
office hours. Surely, it would be more comfortable to get 
in and out of a low phaeton ; this vehicle is as high as that 
loud, conspicuous, advertising florist's wagon — can it be tor 
the same reason ? 

Here in that grinding automobile come a man and two 
women on their way to an East Side table d' liotc, to see 
Bohemia, as they think ; see how reckless and devilish they 
look by anticipation! Up there on that 'bus are some peo- 
ple from the country, real people from the real country, and 

55 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




the coachmen and footmen flock there. 



their mouths are open and 
they don't care. They are 
having much more pleasure 
out of their trip than the 
self-conscious family group 
entering that big gilded 
hotel, whose windows are 
constructed for seeing in as 
well as out (and that is 
another way of advertis- 
ing). 

Here comes a prominent citizen outlining his speech on 
his way home to dress for the great banquet to-night, for 
he is a well-known after-dinner orator, and during certain 
months of the year never has a chance to dine at home with 
his family. Suppose, after all, he fails of being nominated ! 
Here come a man and his wife walking down to a well- 
known restaurant — early, so that he will have plenty of time 
to smoke at the table and she to get comfortably settled at 
the theatre with the programme folded before the curtain 
rises ; such a sensible way. He is not prominent at all, but 
they have a great deal of quiet happiness out of living, these 
two. 

And there goes the very English comedian these two are 
to see in Pinero's new piece after dinner, though they did 
not observe him, to his disappointment. It is rather late for 
an actor to be walkino; down to his club to dine, but he is 

56 



THE WALK UP-TOWN 




The Cliurch of the Heavenly Rest. 



the star and doesn't come on 
until the end of the lirst act, 
and his costume is merely 
that same broad-shouldered 
English-cut frock coat he 
now has on. We, how- 
ever, must hurry on. 

Because it keeps the 
eyes so busy, seeing all the 
people that pass, one block 
ot buildings seems very much like another the first few times 
the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for con- 
spicuous landmarks like that o£ the new library on the site 
of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old 
Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories ; but after awhile 
all the blocks begin to seem very diflPerent ; not only the 
one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed, 
or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks 
formerly considered monotonous. There are volumes ot 
stories along the way. Down Twenty-ninth Street can be 
seen, so near the avenue and yet so sequestered, the Church of 
the Transfiguration, as quaint and low and toy-like as a stage- 
setting, ever blessed by stage-people for the act which made 
the Little Church Around the Corner known to everyone, and 
by which certain pharisees were taught the lesson they should 
have learned from the parable in their New Testament. 

57 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

Farther up is a church of another sort, where Europeans 
of more or less noble blood marry American daughters of 
acknowledged solvency, while the crowd covers the side- 
walks and neighboring house-steps. Here, consequently, 
other people's children come to be married, though neither, 
perhaps, attended this church before the rehearsal, and get 
quite a good deal about it in the society column too, though, 
to tell the truth, they had hoped that the solemn union 
of these two souls would appropriately call forth more 
publicity. Shed a tear for them in passing. There are 
many similar disappointments in life along this thorough- 
fare. 

Farther back we passed what a famous old rich man 
intended for the finest house in New York, and it has thus 
far served chieliy as a marble moral. Its brilliance is dingy 
now, its impressiveness is gone, and its grandeur is some- 
thing like that of a Swiss chalet at the base of a mountain 
since the erection across the street of an overpowering, gUt- 
tering hotel. 

This is the region of clubs ; they are more numerous 
than drug-stores, as thick as florists' shops. But it seems 
only yesterday that a certain club, in moving up beyond 
Fortieth Street, was said to be going ruinously far up-town. 
Now nearly all the well-known clubs are creeping farther 
and farther along, even the old Union Club, which for long 
pretended to enjoy its cheerless exclusiveness down at the 
corner of Twenty-first Street, stranded among piano-makers 

58 



THE WALK UP-TO\VN 




Apprc)iu:hing St. Thomas's. 

and publishers, and then with a leap and a hound went up 
to Fiftieth Street to build its bright new home. 

Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fiftv-fourth 
Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls, 
which never tail to draw attention from the out-of-town 
visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town, 
and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not 
be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park en- 
trance. I wonder it anyone knows the names of them all ; 
there always seem to be others to learn about. Also one 
learns in time that two or three houses which tor a lono- 

o 

time were thought to be clubs are really the homes ot 
former mayors, receiving from the city, according to the 
old Dutch custom, the two lighted lamps for their door- 
ways. This section of the avenue where, in former years, 
were well-known rural road-houses along the drive, is once 

59 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




The University Club 



with college coats of arms. 



more becoming, since the 
residence regime is over, the 
region of famous hostelries 
of another sort. 

There is just one of the 
old variety left, and it, 
strangely enough, is within 
a few feet of two of the 
most famous restaurants in 
America — the somewhat 
quaint and quite dirty old 
Willow Tree Cottage ; named presumably for the tough 
old willow-tree which still persistently stands out in front, 
not seeming to mind the glare and stare of the tall elec- 
tric lit^hts any more than the complacent old tumble- 
down frame tavern itself resents the proximity of Delmon- 
ico's and Sherry's, with whom it seems to fancy itself to be 
in bitter but successful rivalry — for do not all the coachmen 
and footmen flock there during the long, wet waits of 
winter nights, while the dances are going on across at 
Sherry's and Delmonico's ? Business is better than it has 
been for years. 

In time, even the inconspicuous houses that formerly 
seemed so much alike become differentiated and, like the 
separate blocks, gain individualities of their own, though 
you may never know who are the owners. They mean 
something to you, just as do so many of the regular up-town 

60 



THE WALK UP-TOVVN 




Olyiiil''-'' Jackies on shore leave. 



walkers whose names you 
do not know ; line old com- 
fortable places m a n y of 
them are, even though the 
architects of their day did 
try hard to make them un- 
comfortable w i t h high, 
steep steps and other absurd- 
ities. When a " For Sale " 
sign comes to one ot these 
you feel sorry, and hnally 
when one day in your walk up-town you see it irrevocably 
going the way ot all brick, with a contractor's sign out in front, 
blatantly boasting of his wickedness, you resent it as a per- 
sonal loss. 

It seems all wrong to be pulling down those thick 
walls; exposing the privacy of the inside of the house, its 
arrangement of rooms and hreplaces, and the occupant's taste 
in color and wall decorations. Two young women who take 
the walk up-town always look the other way when they pass 
this sad display ; they say it's unfair to take advantage of the 
house. Soon there will be a deep pit there with puffing 
derricks, the sidewalk closed, and show-bills boldly scream- 
ing. And by the time we have returned from the next so- 
journ out of town there will be an office-building of ever- 
so-many stories or another great hotel. Already the sign 
there will tell about it. 

6i 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

You quicken your pace as you draw near the Park ; some 
of the up-town walkers who live along here have already 
reached the end ot their journey and are running up the 
steps taking out door-keys. The little boy in knickerbock- 
ers who seems responsible for lighting Fifth Avenue has 
already begun his zigzag trip along the street ; soon the 
long double rows of lights will seem to meet in perspective. 
A few belated children are being hurried home by their 
maids from dancing-school ; their white frocks sticking out 
beneath their coats gleam in the half light. Cabs and car- 
riages with diners in them go spinning by, the coachmen 
whip up to pass ahead of you at the street-crossing ; you 
catch a gleam of men's shirt-bosoms within and the light 
fluffiness of women, with the perfume of gloves. Fewer 
people are left on the sidewalks now — those that are look 
at their watches. The sun is well set by the time you 
reach the Plaza, but down Fifty-ninth Street you can see 
long bars of after-glow across the Hudson. 

In the half-dark, under the Park trees, comes a group 
of Italian laborers; their hob - nailed shoes clatter on the 
cement-walk, their blue blouses and red neckerchiefs stand 
out against the almost black of the trees ; they, too, are 
walking home for the night. The Walk Up-town is fin- 
ished and the show is over for to-day. 



62 



THE CROSS STREETS 




Down near the eastern end of the street. 



THE CROSS STREETS 



A CITY should be laid out like a golf links ; except for 
an occasional compromise in the interest ot art or 
expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topog- 
raphy of the country. 

But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the 
commission appointed in 1807 to layout the rural regions 
beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to 
the street now called Houston, and then called North Street, 
probably because it seemed so far north — though, to be sure, 
there were scattered hamlets and villages, with remembered 
and forgotten names, here and there, all the way up to the 

65 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

historic town of Haarlem. The commissioners saw fit to 
mark off straight street after shameless straight street with 
the uncompromising regularity o£ a huge foot-ball field, and 
gave them numbers like the white five-yard lines, instead of 
names. They paid little heed to the original arrangements 
of nature, which had done very well by the island, and still 
less to man's previous provisions, spontaneously made along 
the lines o£ least resistance — except, notably, in the case ot 
Greenwich, which still remains whimsically individual and 
village-like despite the attempt to swallow it whole by the 
" new " city system. 

This plan, calling for endless grading and levelling, re- 
mains to this day the ofiicial city chart as now lived down 
to in the perpendicular gorges cut through the hills ot solid 
rock seen on approaching Manhattan Field; but the com- 
missioners' marks have not invariably been followed, or 
New York would have still fewer of its restful green spots 
to gladden the eye, nor even Central Park, indeed, for that 
space also is checkered in their chart with streets and ave- 
nues as thickly as in the crowded regions above and below it. 

However, anyone can criticise creative work, whether it 
be the plan of a play or a city, but it is difficult to create. 
Not many of us to-day who complacentlv patronize the hon- 
orable commissioners would have made a better job of it it 
we had lived at that time — and had been consulted. For at 
that time, we must bear in mind, even more important for- 
eign luxuries than golf were not highly regarded in Amer- 

66 



'V^- 



Ss^^ 






rj 



\ >i r 






. 3^ 'V. '-f^tO:;?. 









r 






f* 
¥ 




NEW YORK SKETCHES 

ica, and America had quite recently thrown off a foreign 
power. That in itself explains the matter. Our country 
was at the extreme of its reaction from monarchical ideals, 
and democratic simplicity was running into the ground. In 
our straining to be rid of all artificiality we were ousting 
art and beauty too. It was so in most parts of our awkward 
young nation ; but especially did the materialistic tendency 
of this dreary disagreeable period manifest itself here in com- 
mercial New York, where Knickerbocker families were 
lopping the "Vans" off their names — to the amusement of 
contemporaneous aristocracy in older, more conservative 
sections of the country, and in some cases to the sincere 
regret of their present-day descendants. 

Now, the present-day descendants have, in some in- 
stances, restored the original spelling on their visiting cards ; 
in other cases they have consoled themselves with hyphens, 
and most of them, it is safe to say, are bravely recovering 
from the tendency to over-simplicity. But the present-day 
city corporation of Greater New York could not, if it so 
desired, put a Richmond Hill back where it formerly stood, 
southwest of Washington Square and skirted by Minetta 
River — any more than it can bring to life Aaron Burr and 
the other historical personages who at various times occu- 
pied the hospitable villa which stood on the top of it and 
which is also gone to dust. They cannot restore the Collect 
Pond, which was filled up at such great expense, and covered 
by the Tombs prison and which, it is held by those who 

68 




An Evening View of St. Paul's Church. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

ought to know, would have made an admirable centre of a 
£ne park much needed in that section, as the city has since 
learned. They cannot re-establish Love Lane, which used 
to lead from the popular Bloomingdale road (Broadway), 
nearly through the site of the building where this book is 
published, and so westward to Chelsea village. 

They wanted to be very practical, those commissioners 
of 1807. They prided themselves upon it. Naturally they 
did not fancy eccentricities of landscape and could not tole- 
rate sentimental names. ** Love Lane ? What nonsense," 
said these extremely dignified and quite humorless offi- 
cials ; " this is to be Twenty-first Street." They wanted to 
be very practical, and so it seems the greater pity that with 
several years of dignified deliberation they were so unpracti- 
cal as to make that notorious mistake of providing posterity 
with such a paucity of thoroughfares in the directions in 
which most of the traffic was bound to flow — that is, up and 
down, as practical men might have foreseen, and of running 
thick ranks of straight streets, as numerously as possible, 
across the narrow island from river to river, where but few 
were needed ; thus causing the north and south thorough- 
fares, which they have dubbed avenues, to be swamped with 
heterogeneous traffic, complicating the problem for later-day 
rapid transit, giving future generations another cause for crit- 
icism, and furnishing a set of cross streets the like of which 
cannot be found in any other city oi the world. 



70 



THE CROSS STREETS 



I 

These are the streets which visitors to New York 
always remark ; the characteristic cross streets ot the typical 
Lip-town region oi' long regular rows ot rectangular resi- 




The sitjhts ami smells of the water-frrmt are here too. 



dences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps 
leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in 
every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where 
during the long, monotonous mornings " rags-an-bot'l " are 
called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from 
wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard 

71 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or 
the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the 
sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the air- 
ing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the 
corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and 
rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the 
men begin coming home from business. These are the or- 
dinary unromantic streets on which live so few New York- 
ers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or 
Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most 
of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York 
with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may 
be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which 
stretch across the island as straight and stiflf as iron grooves 
and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out 
into which they have gradually encroached, to the other 
river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the 
island is so narrow. 

Away over on the ragged eastern edge of the city it 
starts, out of a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water- 
front with river waves slapping against the solid bulwark. 
Here are open, free sky, wide horizon, the smell of the 
water, or else of the neighboring gas-house, brisk breezes 
and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress begins 
between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys 
meet to fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great 
roomy lumber-yard, with a very small brick building for 

72 




An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side. 
(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets.) 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

an office. A dingy saloon, of course, stands on the corner 
of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the avenues 
have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way 

and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote 

thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades 
of grass come up between the cobble-stones — is a weather- 
boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose 
curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the 
river, thinking of other days. . . . Some warehouses 
and a factory or two are usually along here, with buzz- 
saws snarling ; then another lettered avenue or two and 
the tirst of the elevated railroads roars overhead. This is 
now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but 
the neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of 
the tenement district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and be- 
low in the street, bumping against everyone, thousands of 
city children, each of them with at least one lung. The 
traffic is more crowded now, the street darker, the air not so 
good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdi- 
visions where many families live — very comfortably and 
happily in numerous cases ; you could not induce them to 
move into the sunshine and open of the country. Here, on 
the ground floor of the flat, is a grocery with sickening 
fruit out in front ; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the 
other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot 
coffin lined with soiled white satin, much admired by the 
wise-eyed little girls. 

74 



THE CROSS STREETS 




''-"^■M^hX. 



Up Reekman Street. Each . 



has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block. 



As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its 
rush and roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neigh- 
borhood is said to be more "respectable," meaning more 
expensive ; more of the women on the sidewalks wear hats 
and paint, and there are fewer children without shoes ; pri- 
vate houses are becoming more frequent ; babies less h-e- 

75 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

quent ; there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The 
flats are now apartments ; they have ornate, hideous entrances, 
which add only to the rent. ... So on until here is 
Madison Avenue and a whole block of private houses, varied 
only by an occasional stable, pleasant, clean-looking little 
stables, preferable architecturally to the houses in some cases. 
And here at last is Fifth Avenue ; and it seems miles away 
from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to 
be, with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both 
directions ; New York's wonderful women. New York's 
well-built, tight-collared young men; shining carriages with 
good-looking horses and well-kept harness, mixed with big, 
dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the incon- 
gruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping 
ability. Dodging in and out miraculously are a tew bicy- 
cles. . . . And now when the other side of the avenue 
is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here is the trades- 
people's entrance to the great impressive house on the cor- 
ner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far 
that it will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher- 
boy's family — in this generation, at least. Beyond the con- 
servatory is a bit of backyard, a pathetic little New York 
yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded at the rear by a 
high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious 
brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the 
avenue. 

These next houses, however, are quite fine and impres- 

76 



THE CROSS STREETS 




Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge. 

sive, too, and they are not so alike as they seem at first ; in 
fact, it is quite remarkable how much individuality architects 
have learned of late years to put into the eighteen or twenty 
feet they have to deal with. The monotony is varied occa- 
sionally with an English basement house or a tall wrought- 
iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a 

77 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

white Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the 
house studied art, perhaps, and persuaded his father to make 
this kind of improvement, though the old gentleman was 
inclined to copy the rococo style of the railroad president 
opposite. . . . Half-way down the block, unless a wed- 
ding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall 
Street on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams 
of people flowing up and down Fifth Avenue. 

By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently 
come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not 
only doctors' signs now, but " Robes et Manteaux " are an- 
nounced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely 
Madame somebody. By this time also there have already 
appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, 
** Boarders," or *' Furnished Rooms" — modestly written on 
a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unneces- 
sary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. 
In there, back of these lace- curtains, yellow, though not 
with age, is the parlor — the boarding-house parlor — with 
tidies which always come ofl^ and small gilt chairs which 
generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses 
under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor 
hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate 
frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to 
pav their bills ; down in the basement dining-room is where 
they congregate, you can see them now through the grated 
window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little 

78 



THE CROSS STREETS 




Chinatown, 



tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low 
building back of that tacing the avenue, which latter is al- 
ways a saloon unless it is a drug-store ; on the opposite 
corner is still another saloon — rivals very likely in the Tam- 
many district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a 
pool-room on the tloor above, as all the neighbors know, 
though the local good government club cannot stop it. 
Here is the " family entrance " which no fimily ever enters. 
Then come more apartments and more private residences, 
not invariably pdsse, more boarding-houses, many, many 
boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' board- 
ing-houses, foreign boarding-houses ; more small business 

79 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here 
is the region of warehouses and piano factories and linall)/ 
even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. 
Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the sub- 
urbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have sub- 
urbs ; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from 
residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squeal- 
ing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long 
dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river 
barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the 
end — a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure 
calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typi- 
cal up-town cross street ends its dreary existence. 

II 

Down-town it is so different. 

Down-town — " 'way down-town," in the vernacular — 
in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, 
where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and 
the streets might well be economically straight, and rigor- 
ously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running 
hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, begin- 
ning where they please and ending where it suits them best, 
in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New- 
World architecture. Numbers would do well enou^rh for 

names down here, but instead of concise and business-like 

80 



THE CROSS STREETS 






,^^|m ^^»^ vu 



im0! 











V"-^A). 



It still remains wliimsically individual and village-like. 

Street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names, 
sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these 
streets were born and not made. 

They were born of the needs or whims of the early 
population, including cows, long before the little western 
city became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and 
ordered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was 
too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One 
little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward 
another, each with its own line of streets or paths, until 
finally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring 
whether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or 
both of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's 
Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drain- 
age became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad 
Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden 
Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more 
primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the 
stream which gave the street its present winding shape and 
low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably 
the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this 
street, now the heart ot the diamond district, are the special 
detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every dis- 
tinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard " the 
Lane," as they call it, so caretullv that not in litteen years 
has a member of the profession crossed the " dead-line " 
successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has 
any stream to bridge ; Dock Street, where there is no dock ; 
Water Street, once upon the river-tront but now separated 
from the water by several blocks and much enormously 
valuable real estate ; and Wall Street, which now seems to 
lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought 
to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were of 
no permanent value. 

Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little run- 
ways, these down-town cross streets; so crowded that men 
and horses share the middle of them together ; so narrow 
that from the windy tops of the irregular white cliffs which 
line them you must lean far over in order to see the busy 
little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidly 

82 



THE CROSS STRKKTS 




^ 



m 


















A Fourteenth Street Tree. 



crawling hither and thither Uke excitable ants whose hill has 
been disturbed. And in modern times they seem dark and 
gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air ot 
Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, 
for at best the sun gets into these valleys tor only a tew min- 
utes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they were 
not narrov/ in those old days of the Dutch; seemed quite 
the right width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch 
stoop to another, at close of day, with the after-supper pipe 
when the chickens and children had gone to sleep and there 

83 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

was nothing to interrupt the peaceful, puffing conversation 
except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional cow coming 
home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those 
days, for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a 
time, when they were lined with small low-storied houses 
which the family occupied upstairs, with business below. 
Everyone went home for luncheon in those days — a pleasant, 
simple system adhered to in this city, it is said, until com- 
paratively recent times by more than one family whose pres- 
ent representatives require for their happiness two or three 
homes in various other parts of the world in addition to 
their town house. This latter does not contain a shop on 
the ground flour. It is situated far up the island, at some 
point beyond the marsh where their forebears went duck- 
shooting (now Washington Square], or in some cases even 
beyond the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the 
Boston Post road crossed the small stream where Seventy- 
seventh Street now runs. 

Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross 
streets can be very long, as was pointed out, even at the 
city's greatest breadth. The highest cross-street number I 
ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But these down-town 
cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed in 
getting all the way across without stopping ; they are so 
abruptly short that each little street has to change in the 
greatest possible hurry from block to block, like vaudeville 
performers, in order to show all the features of a self-re- 

84 




Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

specting cross street in the business section. Hence the 
sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of a cer- 
tain well-known business street may be seen some low 
houses of sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now 
with their solid walls and visible roofs. They line an open, 
sunny spot, with the smell of spices and coffee in the air. 
A market was situated here over a hundred years ago, and 
this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a market- 
place. The sights and smells ot the water-front are here, 
too, ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging 
before dingy drin king-places, and across the cobble-stones is 
a ferry-house, with " truck " wagons on the way back to 
Long Island waiting for the gates to open, the unmistakable 
country mud, so different from city mire, still sticking in 
cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent in 
town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but 
that the name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so 
different from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with 
crowded walks, dapper business men, creased trousers, tall, 
steel buildings, express elevators, messengers dashing in and 
out, tickers busy, and all the hum and suppressed excitement 
of the Wall Street the world knows, as different and as sud- 
denly different as the change that is felt in the very air upon 
stepping across through the noise and shabby rush of lower 
Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village, 
with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old- 
fashioned balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles. 

86 




A Cross Street at Madison Square. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 



The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of 
course, that latter part, the section more or less near Broad- 
way, and crowded to suffocation with great businesses in 

great buildings, common- 
ly k n o w n as hideous 
American sky - scrapers. 
This is the real down- 
town to most of the men 
who are down there, and 
who are too busy think- 
ing about what these 
streets mean to each ot 
them to - day to bother 
much with what the 
streets were in the past, 
or even to notice how the 
modern tangle ot spars 
and rigging looks as seen 
down at the end ot the 
street fro m the office 
window. 

Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether 
possessed of creative genius or of intelligence enough only 
to run one of the elevators, are alike Philistines to those 
persons who find nothing romantic or interesting in our 
modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers, which have also been 
called " monuments of modern materialism," and even worse 

88 




Across Twenty-fourth Street— Madison Square when the 
Dewey Arch was there. 



THE CROSS STREETS 

names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unaca- 
demic, probably, as much as because uglv and unrestrained. 
To many ot us, however, shameless as it may be to confess 
it, these down-town streets are fascinating enough for what 
they are to-day, even if they had no past to make them all 
the more charming; and these erect, jubilant young build- 
ings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting — from 
their bright tops, where, far above the tin'moil and confu- 
sion, Mrs. Janitor sits sewing in the sun while the children 
play hide-and-seek behind water-butts and air-shafts (there 
is no danger of tailing off', it is a relief to know, because the 
roof is walled in like a garden), down to the dark bottom 
where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old watch- 
men, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them, 
along-side of wills that may cause family fights a few years 
later, and add to the affluence o£ certain lawyers in the 
offices overhead. Deep down, thirty or forty feet under the 
crowded sidew^alk, the stokers shovel coal under big boilers 
all day, and electricians do interesting tricks with switch- 
boards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship. 
In the many tiers of fioors overhead are the men with the 
minds that make these high buildings necessary and make 
do\vn-town what it is, with their dreams and schemes, their 
courage and imagination, their trust and distrust in the 
knowledo;e and ig-norance of other human beino^s which are 
the means by which thev bring abcnit great successes and 
great failures, and have all the fun of playing a game, with 

89 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

the peace of conscience and self-satisfaction which come 
from hard work and manly sweat. 

Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving 
about, far up on high or down near the teeming surface, in 
and out of the numerous subdivisions termed offices, until 
finally they call the game off for the day, go down in the 
express elevator, out upon the narrow little streets, and turn 
north toward the upper part of the island. And each, like 
a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a 
long, solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of 
town where run the many rows of even, similar streets. 

HI 

These two views across two parts of New York, the two 
most typical parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might 
see and feel, who came and looked and departed. Very 
little has been said to show what the cross-streets mean to 
those who are in the town and of it, who know the town 
and like it — either because their ''father's father's father" 
did, or else because their work or fate has cast them upon 
this island and kept them there until it no longer seems a 
desert island. The latter class, indeed, when once they have 
learned to love the town of their adoption, frequently be- 
come its warmest enthusiasts, even though they may have 
held at one time that city contentedness could not be had 
without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civiliza- 

90 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

tions, or even that true happiness was impossible when 
walled in by stone and steel from the sight and smell of 
green fields and running brooks. 

He who loves New York loves its streets for what they 
have been and are to him, not for what they may seem to 
those who do not use them. They who know the town 
best become as homesick when away from it for the straight- 
ness ot the well-kept streets up-town as for the crookedness 
and quaintness ot the noisy thoroughfares below. The 
straightness, they point out complacently, is very convenient 
for getting about, just as the numbering system makes it easy 
lor strangers. On the walk up-town they enjoy looking 
down upon the expected unexpectedness of the odd little 
cross streets, which twist and turn or end suddenly in blank 
walls, or are crossed by passageways in mid-air, like the 
Bridge ot Sighs, down Franklin Street, from the Criminal 
Court-house to the Tombs. But farther along in their walk 
they are just as fond ot looking down the perspective of the 
straight side streets from the central spine of Fifth Avenue 
past block alter block of New York homes, away down be- 
yond the almost-converging rows of even lamp-posts to the 
Hudson and the purple Palisades of Jersey, with the glorious 
gleam and glow of the sunset; while the energetic "L" 
trains scurry past, one after another, trailing beautiful swirls 
of steam and carrying other New Yorkers to other homes. 
None ot this could be enjoyed if the cross streets tied knots 
in themselves like those in London and some American 

92 



THE CROSS STREETS 



#^*^ 




As it Looks on a Wet Night— The Circle, Fifty-ninth Street and l-.ighth Avenue. 

cities. Even outsiders appreciate these characteristic New 
York vistas ; and nearly every poet who comes to town dis- 
covers its svmbolic incongruity afresh and sings it to those 
who have enjoved it before he was born, just as most young 
writers of prose feel called upon to turn their attention the 
other way and unearth the great East Side of New York. 
There is no such thing as a typical cross street to New 

93 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

Yorkers. Individually, each thoroughfare departs as widely 
from the type as the men who walk along them differ from 
the hgure known in certain parts of this country as the 
typical New Yorker. In New York there is no typical New 
Yorker. These so-called similar streets, which look so much 
alike to a visitor driving up Fifth Avenue, end so very dif- 
ferently. Some ot them, for instance, after beginning their 
decline toward the river and oblivion, are redeemed to re- 
spectability, not to say exclusiveness, again, like some of the 
streets in the small Twentieths running out into what was 
formerly the village of Chelsea ; and those who know New 
York — even when standing where the Twentieth Streets are 
tainted with Sixth Avenue — are cognizant of this fact, just 
as they are ot the peace and green campus and academic 
architecture of the Episcopal Theological Seminary away 
over there, and of the thirty-foot lawns of London Terrace, 
far down along West Twenty-third Street. 

There are other residence streets which do not decline 
at all, but are solidly impressive and expensive all the way 
over to the river, like those from Central Park to Riverside 
Drive. And your old New Yorker does not feel depressed 
by their conventional similarity, their lack of individuality; 
he likes to think that these streets and houses no longer 
seem so unbearablv new as they were only a short time ago, 
but in some cases are at last acquiring the atmosphere of 
home and getting rid of the odor of a real-estate project. 
Then, of course, so many cross streets would refuse to be 

94 



THE CROSS STREETS 




Hideous high buildings. 
Looking east from Central Park at night. 



classed as typical because they run through squares or parks, 
or into reservoirs or other streets, or jump over railroad 
tracks by means of viaducts, burrow under avenues by means 
of tunnels, or end abruptly at the top ot a hill on a high 
embankment of interesting masonry, as at the eastern termi- 
nus of Forty-first Street — a spot which never feels like New 
York at all to me. 

Some notice should be taken also of those all-important 

95 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

up-town cross streets where business has eaten out residence 
in streaks, as moths devour clothes, such as broad Twenty- 
third Street with its famous shops, and narrow Twenty- 
eighth Street, with its numerous cheap table d'/wtes, each ot 
which is the best in town; and 125th Street, which is a 
Harlem combination of both. These are the streets by 
which surface-car passengers are transferred all over the city. 
These are the streets upon which those who have grown up 
with New York, if they have paid attention to its growth, 
as well as their own, delight to meditate. Even compara- 
tively young old New Yorkers can say '* 1 remember when " 
of memorable evenings in the old Academy ot Music in 
Fourteenth Street off Union Square, and of the days when 
Delmonico's had got as far up-town as Fourteenth Street 
and Fifth Avenue. 

Furthermore, it could easily be shown that, for those 
who love old New York, there is plenty of local historical 
association along these same straight, unromantic-looking 
cross streets — for those who know how to tind it. For that 
matter one mio:ht ao still further and hold that there would 
not be so much antiquarian delight in New York if these 
streets were not new and straight and non-committal look- 
ing. If, for instance, the old Union Road, which was the 
roundabout, wet-weather route to Greenwich village, had 
not been cut up and mangled by a merciless city plan there 
wouldn't be the fan of tracing it by projecting corners and 
odd angles of houses along West Twelfth Street between 

96 



THE CROSS STREETS 

Fifth and Sixth Avenues, It would he merely an open, or- 
dinary street, concealing nothing, and no more exciting to 
follow than Pearl Street down-town — and not halt so 
crooked or historical as Pearl Street. There would not he 
that odd, pocket-like courtway called Mulligan " Place," 
with a dimly lighted entrance leading off Sixth Avenue he- 
tween Tenth and Eleventh Streets. Nor would there he 
that still more interesting triangular remnant of an old Jew- 
ish burying-ground over the way, behind the old Cirapevine 
Tavern. For either the whole cemetery would have been 
allowed to remain on Union Road (or Street), which is not 
likely, or else they would have removed all the graves and 
covered the entire site with buildings, as was the case with a 
dozen other burying-grounds here and there. It the com- 
missioners had not had their way we could not have all those 
inner rows of houses to explore, like the " Weaver's Row," 
once near the Great Kiln Road, but now buried behind 
a Sixth Avenue store between Sixteenth and Seventeenth 
Streets, and entered, it entered at all, bv way ot a dark, ill- 
smelling alley. Nor would the negro quarter, a little farther 
up-town, have its inner row\s which seem so appropriate for 
negro quarters, especially the whitewashed courts opening 
off Thirtieth Street, where may be found, in these secluded 
spots, trees and seats under them, with old, turbanned mam- 
mies smoking pipes and looking much more like Richmond 
darkies than those one expects to see two blocks trom Daly's 
Theatre. Colonel Carter of Cartersville could not have 

97 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

found such an interesting New York residence if the com- 
missioners had not had their way, nor could he have en- 
tered it by a tunnel-Hke passage under the house opposite 
the Tenth Street studios. Even Greenwich would not be 
quite so entertaining without those permanent marks of the 
conflict between village and city which resulted in separating 
West Eleventh Street so far from Tenth, and in twisting 
Fourth Street around farther and farther until it hnally ends 
in despair in Thirteenth Street. It the commissioners had 
not had their way we should have had no *' Down Love 
Lane " written by Mr. Janvier. 

Looked at from the point of view of use and knowledge, 
every street, like every person, gains a distinct personality, 
some being merely more strongly distinguished than others. 
And just as every human being, whatever his name or his 
looks may be, continues to win more or less sympathy the 
more you know of him and his history and his ambitions, so 
with these streets, and their checkered careers, their sudden 
changes from decade to decade — or in still less time, in our 
American cities, their transformation from farm land to 
suburban road, and then to fashionable city street, and then 
to small business and then to great business. Such, after all, 
is the stuff of which abiding city charm is made, not of 
plans and architecture. 



98 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 



u.o; 




RURAL NEW YORK CITY 

THERE is pretty good snipe shooting within the city 
limits of New York, and I have heard that an occa- 
sional trout still rises to the Hy in one or two spots along a 
certain stream — which need not be made better known than 
it is already, though it can hardly be worth whipping 
much longer at any rate. 

A great many ducks, however, are still shot every season 
in the city, by those who know where to go for them ; and 
as for inferior sport, like rabbits — if you include them as 
game — on certain days of the year probably more gunners 
and does are out after rabbits within the limits of Greater 
New York than in any region of equal extent in the world, 
though to be sure the bags brought in hardly compare with 
those of certain parts of Australia or some of our Western 
States. Down toward Far Rockaway, a little this side of 
the salt marshes of Jamaica Bav, in the hedges and cabbage- 
patches of the '' truck " fiirms, there is plenty of good cover 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

for rabbits, as well as in the brush-piles and pastures of the 
rolling Borough of Richmond on Staten Island, and the for- 
ests and stone fences of the hilly Bronx, up around Pelham 
Bay Park for instance. But the gunners must keep out of 
the parks, of course, though many ubiquitous little boys with 
snares do not. 

In such parts of the city, except when No Trespassing 
signs prevent, on any day of the open season scores of men 
and youths may be seen whose work and homes are gener- 
ally in the densest parts of the city, respectable citizens from 
the extreme east and west sides of Manhattan, artisans and 
clerks, salesmen and small shopkeepers, who, quite unex- 
pectedly in some cases, share the ancient fret and longing of 
the primitive man in common with those other New York- 
ers who can go farther out on Long Island or farther up 
into New York State to satisfy it. To be sure, the former 
do not get as many shots as the latter, but they get the out- 
doors and the exercise and the return to nature, which is 
the main thing. And the advantage of going shooting in 
Greater New York is that you can tramp until too dark to 
see, and yet get back in time to dine at home, thus satisfy- 
ing an appetite acquired in the open with a dinner cooked 
in the city. 

Once a certain young family went off to a far corner of 
Greater New York to attack the perennial summer problem. 
By walking through a hideously suburban village with a 
beautifully rural name they found, just over the brow of a 

I02 




Flusliing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire Alarm. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

hill, quite as a friend had told them they would, tucked 
away all alone in a green glade beside an ancient forest, a 
charming little diamond-paned, lattice-windowed cottage, 
covered thick with vines outside, and yet supplied with 
modern plumbing within. It seemed too good to be true. 
There was no distinctly front yard or back yard, not even a 
public road in sight, and no neighbors to bother them ex- 
cept the landlord, who lived in the one house near by and was 
very agreeable. All through the close season they enjoyed 
the whistling of quail at their breakfast ; in their afternoon 
walks, squirrels and rabbits and uncommon song-birds were 
too common to be remarked ; and once, within forty yards 
of the house, great consternation was caused by a black snake, 
though it was not black snakes but mosquitoes that made 
them look elsewhere next year, and taught them a life-lesson 
in regard to English lattice-windows and American mosquito- 
screens. 

But until the mosquitoes became so persistent it seemed 
— this country-place within a city, or riis hi iirbe^ as they 
probably enjoyed calling it — an almost perfect solution of 
the problem for a small family whose head had to be within 
commuting distance of down-town. For though so remote, 
it was not inaccessible ; two railroads and a trolley line were 
just over the dip of the hill that hid them, so that there was 
time for the young man of the house to linger with his 
family at breakfast, which was served out-of-doors, with no 
more objectionable witnesses than the thrushes in the hedges. 

104 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York. 
"Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight." 

And then, too, there was time to get exercise in the after- 
noon before dinner. *' It seemed an ideal spot," to quote 
their account of it, *' except that on our walks, just as we 
thought that we had found some sequestered dell where no- 
body had come since the Indians left, we would be pretty 
sure to hear a slight rustle behind us, and there — not an 
Indian but a Tammany policeman would break through the 
thicket, with startling white gloves and gleaming brass but- 
tons, looking exactly like the policemen in the Park. Of 
course he would continue on his beat and disappear in a mo- 
ment, but by that time we had forgotten to listen to the 
birds and things, and the distant hum of the trolley would 
break in and remind us of all things we have wanted to forget." 

105 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

I 

In a way, that is rather typical of most of the ruraHty 
found within the boundaries of these modern aggregations or 
trusts of large and small towns, and intervening country, 
held together (more or less) by one name, under one munic- 
ipal government, and called a " city " by legislature. There 
is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls — 
called limits — there is plenty of nature, but in most cases 
those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no 
longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched 
out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen. 

You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic sim- 
plicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and 
primeval forest ; indeed, even forest fires have been known 
in Greater New York. But the trouble is that so often the 
bucolic simplicity has cleverly advertised lots staked out 
across it ; the rural seclusion shows a couple of factory chim- 
neys on the near horizon. The forest fire was put out by 
the fire department. 

There are numerous peaceful duck-ponds in the Borough 
of Queens, for instance, as muddy and peaceful as ever you 
saw, but so many of them are lighted by gas every evening. 
Besides the fisheries, there is profitable oyster-dredging in 
several sections of this city ; and in at least one place it can 
be seen by electric Hght. There are many potato-patches 
patrolled by the police. 

io6 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 



i , ■ . "1 ,T' 




One of the Farmhouses that Have Come to Town. 

The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers. 

Not tar from the geographical centre of the city there 
are fields where, as all who have ever commuted to and from 
the north shore of Long Island must rememher, German 
women may be seen every day in the tilling season, working 
away as industriously as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, 
red handkerchiefs about their heads, and all ; while not tar 

107 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

away, at frequent intervals, passes a whining, thumping trol- 
ley-car, marked Brooklyn Bridge. 

In another quarter, on a dreary, desolate waste, neither 




East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled. 

farm land, nor city, nor village, there stands an old weather- 
beaten hut, long, low, patched up and tumbled down, with 
an old soap-box for a front doorstep — all beautifully toned 
by time, the kind amateurs like to sketch, when found far 
away from home in their travels. The thing that recalls 
the city in this case, rather startlingly, is a rudely lettered 
sign, with the S's turned the wrong way, offering lots for 
sale in Greater New York. 

It is not necessary to go far away from the beaten paths 

io8 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 



of travel in Greater New York to witness any of these 
scenes of the comedy, sometimes tragedy, hroiight ahout hy 
the contending forces of city and country. Most of what 



,-^i.(rP^/^ 







The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old Countrj' Cruss-r. la.K Store. 

has been cited can be observed from car-windows. For that 
matter, somewhat similar incongruity can be found in all of 
our modern, legally enlarged cities, London, with the hedges 
and gardens of Hampstead Heath, and certain parts of the 
Surrey Side, or Chicago, with its broad stretches of prairie 
and farms — the subject ot so many American newspaper 
jokes a tew years ago. 

But New York — and this is another respect in which 
it is different from other cities — our great Greater New 

109 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 




The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828. 
Ill tlie background is the old water-power mill. 



York, which is better known as having the most densely 
populated tenement districts in the world, can show places 
that are more truly rural than any other city of modern 
times, places where the town does not succeed in obtruding 
itself at all. From Hampstead Heath, green and delightful 
as it is, every now and then the gilded cross of St. Paul's 
may be seen gleaming far below through the trees. And in 
Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can 
spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie; 
even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines 
there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke. 
But out in the broad, rolling farm lands of Long Island you 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store. 



can walk on for hours and not find any sign of the city you 
are in, except the enormous tax-rate, which, hy the way, has 
the effect ot discouraging the farmers (many of whom did 
not want to hecome city people at all) from spending money 
tor paint and improvements, and this only results in making 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 





'j'Mi 



ir "/j^^^ 






'^•yV/ 








■£3 









The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographi- 
cal Centre of New York City. 



the country look more prim- 
itive, and less like what is 
absurdly called a city. 

But the best of these rural 
parts of town cannot be spied 
from car - windows, or the 
beaten paths of travel. 

II 

Make a journey out 
through the open country to 
the southeast of Flushing, past 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 






-<^ 






-— ■■^'^Vj||iir_ 






^^ai^^sjiljaz^!^ 



i-.i.vSnliliWf/fSI 









„ . v-i-"^^ '•f>*Ai.i 



rix,:^*-*:":. 






the Oakland 
Golf Club, and 
over toward the 
Creedmoor Ri- 
fle Range, after 



'•_■-■ > 




'\ - ,«a^:^-\."i2ffl -- M. T >^r*=^' --^^v./iff^ 'm';^<ti» 



J^.VVMI,.,/^: 




[..tXi^^H' 



T'i^'5* 



W^;:! 



^■a0%'>^^" 



■ ^^->^^^^^ 



Working as industrially as thie peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs 
about their heads . . . 



a while turn 
north and fol- 
low a twisting 

road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little 
Neck Bay, where a few of the many Little Neck clams come 
from. All of these places are well within the eastern boun- 
dary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very 
good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but 
only one kind, for it is only one small corner of a very 
big place. 

As soon as you have ridden, or walked — it is better to 
walk if there is plenty of time — beyond the fine elms of 
the ancient Flushing streets, you will be in as peaceful look- 

113 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 



ing farming country as can be found anywhere. But the in- 
teresting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few 
incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rap- 
idly devouring suburban towns — like the fields near Wood- 
side where the German women work — out here one rides 

through acre after acre of it, 
farm after farm, mile after mile, 
up hill, down hill, corn-fields, 
wheat-fields, stone fences, rail 
fences, no fences, and never a 
town in sight, much less any- 
thing to suggest the city, except 
the procession of market-wagons 
at certain hours, to or from Col- 
lege Point Ferry, and they aren't 
so conspicuously urban after all. 
Even the huge advertising 
sign-boards which usually shout 
to passers-by along the approaches 
to cities are rather scarce in this 
country, for it is about midway 
between two branches of the only railroad on Long Island, 
and there is no need for a trolley. There is nothing but 
country roads, with more or less comfortable farm-houses 
and large, squatty barns ; not only old farm-houses, but what 
is much more striking, farm-houses that are new. Now, it 
does seem odd to build a new farm-house in a city. 

114 




Remains of a Windmill in New York City, Be- 
tween Astoria and Steinway. 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




The Dreary Edge of Long Island City. 



Out in the fields the men are ploughing. A rooster 
crows in the harn-yard. A woman comes out to take in 
the clothes. Children climb the fence to gaze when 
people pass by. And one can ride for a matter of miles 
and see no other kind of life, except the birds in the hedge 
and an occasional country dog, not suburban dogs, but dis- 
tinctly farm dogs, the kind that have deep, ominous barks, as 
heard at night from a distance. By and by, down the dusty, 
sunnv, lane-like road plods a fat old family Dobbin, pulling 
an old-fishioned phaeton in which are seated a couple ot prim 
old maiden ladies, dressed in black, who try to make him 
move faster in the presence of strangers, and so push and 
jerk animatedly on the reins, which he enjoys catching 

"5 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

with his tail, and holds serenely until beyond the bend in 
the road. 

Ot course, this is part of the city. The road map proves 
it. But there are very few places along this route where you 
can find it out in any other way. The road leads up over 
a sort of plateau ; a wide expanse of country can be viewed 





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The ProcL-ssloa of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry. 

in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more 
farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church 
steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant 
and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, 
across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to 
be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. 
They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all 
that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the 
eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. And over 

ii6 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 





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Past dirtv backvards and sad vacant lots. 



there, more to the west, is dreary East New York and end- 
less Brooklyn, and dirty Long Island City, and, still farther, 
crowded Manhattan Island itself. Then one realizes some- 
thing of the extent of this strange manner of city. It is 
very ridiculous. 

When at last the head of Little Neck Bay is reached, 
here is another variety of primitive country scene. The up- 
land road skirting the hill, bevond which the rities of Creed- 
moor are crashing, takes a sudden turn down a steep grade, 
a guileless-looking grade, but very dangerous for bicvclists, 
especially in the fall when the ruts and rocks are covered 
thick with leaves for days at a time. Then, after passing a 
nearer view (through a vista of big trees) of the blue Sound, 

117 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

with the darker blue of the hills beyond, the road drops 
down into a peaceful old valley, tucked away as serene and 
unmolested as it was early in the nineteenth century, when 
the country cross-roads store down there was lirst built, along- 
side of the water-power mill, which is somewhat older. In 
front is an old dam and mill-pond, called " The Alley," re- 
cently improved, but still containing black bass ; in the rear 
Little Neck Bay opens out to the Sound beyond, one of the 
sniping and ducking places of Greater New York. The old 
store, presumably the polling-place of that election district 
of the city, is where prominent personages of the neighbor- 
hood congregate and tell fishing and shooting stories, and gos- 
sip, and talk politics, seated on boxes and barrels around the 
white-bodied stove, for the sake of which they chew tobacco. 

It is one of those stores that contain everything — from 
anchor-chains to chewing-gum. There are bicycle sundries 
in the show-case and boneless bacon suspended from the old 
rafters, but the best thing in the place is a stream of running 
water. This is led down by a pipe from the side of the 
hill, acts as a refrigerator for a sort of bar in one corner of 
the store — for this establishment sells a greater variety ot 
commodities than most department stores — and passes out 
into Long Island Sound in the rear. 

The fact that they are in Greater New York does not 
seem to bother them much down in this happy valley , at 
least it hasn't changed their mode of life apparently. The 
last time we were there a well-tanned Long Islander w^as 

iiS 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx Regions— Skating at liron.xdale. 

buying some duck loads ; he said he was merely going out 
after a few snipe, but he ordered No. 5's. 

" Have you a policeman out here? " we asked him. 

" Oh, yes, but he doesn't come around very often." 

** How often ? " 

** Oh, I generally catch a glimpse of him once a month 
or so," said the gunner. " But then, you see, these here city 
policemen have to be pretty careful, they're likely to get lost." 

*' Down near Bay Ridge," a man on the cracker-barrel 

put in as he stroked the store-cat, *' one night a policeman 

got off his beat and foundered into the swamp, and it it 

hadn't been that some folks of the neighborhood rescued 

him, he'd have perished — of mosquitoes." 

119 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

" We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north 
shore," put in the other, addressing us without bHnking. He 
is probably the humorist of the neighborhood. 

This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be 
made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of 
rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the 
most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort, 
seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay : 

Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass 
that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersect- 
ed here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals 
there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close to- 
gether for comfort. Away ofl^ in the distance the yellow 
sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the 
deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon. 

The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the 
early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds 
begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud 
flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, 
and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue 
band of the ocean, . . . The sun gets hot. The tide 
turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again. 
The sun sinks lower ; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly. 
The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun 
sets splendidlv across the long, flat plain ; another day has 
passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




Another Kind of City Life— Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay. 

within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is 
the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes, 
and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line 
is the smoke ot a home-coming steamer, whose approach 
has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles 
down the coast. 

Then, here is another sort : A rambling, stony road, oc- 
casionally passing comfortable old houses — historic houses 
in some cases — with trees and lawns in front, leading down 
to Stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed 
house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old- 
fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the 
bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles, 
carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a 
little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, 
too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better 
known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds 
of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need 
not be described. 

Ill 

Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather 
monotonous ; they are too common. But there is one kind 
of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has 
never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient 
or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the 
centre of the 317 square miles of New York — so well as the 
centre of a boot-shaped area can be located. 

Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, 
which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets 
would have us believe ; take the car marked *' Steinway," 
and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary 
city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tene- 
ments, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the 
last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons. 
Soon after passing a tumble-dcnvn windmill, which looks 
like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built 
in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk 
Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, 




There is profitable oyster-dredgiiiK in several sections of the city. 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

low wings of the building covered with windows like a hot- 
house). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down 
the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred 
yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the 
odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers 
who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York. 

At short distances are the other huts crouching at the 
foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to 
dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge 
baskets, and mattings — all clearly from China ; they are as 
different from what could be bought on the neighboring 
avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different 
from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the 
fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every 
inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even 
divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers 
themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, 
their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the 
western world wags on in its own way all around them. 
This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade- 
ground of the Waldorf-Astoria. 

They have only three houses among them, that is, there 

are only three of these groups of rooms, made ot old boards 

and boxes and covered with tar paper ; but no one in the 

neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live 

there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more 

over in Pell Street. 

124 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 

Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a 
peculiar kind oi bean and some sort of salad, and those large, 
artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, 
which they call something that sounds like " moncha," and 
which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from 
the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For 
my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had 
always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and 
green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be 
found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old 
shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, look- 
ing inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through 
Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to 
Chinatown ; then back to the tarm again, looking inscrutable. 
And on Sundays, tor all we know, they leave the wagon be- 
hind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, 
or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of 
Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming 
on dreary Monday mornings. 

IV 

Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly 
unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on 
which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington 
with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breast- 
works, and, under their branches, a line view up the Hud- 

125 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

son to the mountains — a quiet, sequestered bit of public park 
which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though 
within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the 
Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up 
there every spring, and until quite recently so few people 




Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island. 

visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes 
woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded 
ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the 
breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf 
man who tends the river light on Jefli-eys Hook will become 
sophisticated, if he is still alive. 

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the 
north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood 
and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And 
across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up 
through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vin- 

r26 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 



cent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, 
comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so 
many of the tine country places thereabouts are being de- 
serted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful 
road which does not look like a part of the same thorough- 




-'tj^'feiEl 



A Peaceful Scene in New York. 
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Dorough of Richmond, Staten Island. 

fare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are 
the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and \^an Cortlandt Park, 
where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the 
trees used to say *' Beware of the Buffaloes." 

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to 
do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. 
Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done 
for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still nat- 
ural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in 
all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan 
ill the yearly thousands of amateur photographs — the camera 

127 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

does not show the German family approaching from the rear, 
or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes 
— but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a 
blossom. 

V 

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature 
except the highest can lind plenty to sigh over in the way 




A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond. 

the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who 
think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less 
worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the 
Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so 
deeply deplorable. 

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up 
toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on 
Staten Island — not only those which everybody knows, like 

128 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 

the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort 
at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been 
exploited in plays or books, and which still have a line old 
tiavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much 
earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, 
thouQ;h still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields 
all about, thev are now used tor Tammany head-quarters 
with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old- 




An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island.) 

fashioned windows — but most of them would have ijone out 
of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it 
had not been tor the approach of the city, and the side- 
whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove 
fast horses. It the ghosts of these men ever drive back to 
lament the good old davs together, thev must be somewhat 
surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road- 
houses doing a better business than even in their day. The 

129 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has 
since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exer- 
cise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. 
They are visited now in automobiles. 

There are all those historic country-houses within the 
city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly 
by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt 
house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion stand- 
ing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most his- 
torical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has 
adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion ; and the old Lor- 
illard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this 
time but that it has been made into a park house and restau- 
rant. Nearly all these are tableted by the " patriotic " socie- 
ties, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place 
in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, 
was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself — an 
excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, 
though not so old by twenty-live years as it is painted in the 
sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be pre- 
served as a museum too. 

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the 
Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide 
window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden 
cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the 
ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to 
point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hes- 

130 



RURAL NEW YORK CITY 




An Old House in Flatbush. 



sian officers, during the long monotonous months when "the 
main army of the British army lay at Flushing from White- 
stone to Jamaica ; " and upon Flushing Heights there stood 
one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to 
Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used 
to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the 
Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead 
Plains to the fox-hunts — where the Meadowbrook Hunt 
Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers 
meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, ac- 
cording to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about 
a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest ap- 

131 



NEW YORK SKETCHES 

proach to the great game at that time in America, and it 
may have been played on the site of the present Flushing 
Golf Club. 

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less inno- 
cent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in 
and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live 
stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into 
meals by the British. That may account for the habit of 
the family occupying the Duryea place referred to ; they 
keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any 
rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to 
see sights of that sort. 

Those are a few of the historic country places that have 
come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of 
them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by 
the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at 
least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made 
much of. 

But the many abandoned country houses which are not 
especially historic or significant — except to certain old per- 
sons to whom they once meant home — goodly old places, no 
longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well 
within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. Nobody 
pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign 
hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The 
tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to ap- 
pear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows, 

132 



RURAL NEW YORK CTTY 

hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old- 
tashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play 
hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or 
buried under tin cans. . . . Across the way, perhaps, 
there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap, 
vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly 
painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented 
wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair 
fronts. They look at times as though they were putting 
their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old 
neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no 
electric bell, no tolding-beds, and not a bit ot zinc cornicing. 
Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, 
thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end — which 
will come soon enough. 



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